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Inheritors of the Roman Empire
The era of the '''Inheritors of the Roman Empire' lasted from about 476 AD until 570 AD. It began with the ousting of the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, by a Germanic warlord. It then ended with the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, in whose name the Arabs would remake the Near East and beyond. There were in effect three inheritors of the Roman Empire. The first were the so-called ''Barbarian Kingdoms'' that emerged from Germanic invasions of the west, and among which lie the origins of the first nations of modern Europe. These fell clearly into four major and distinctive groups. The northernmost, the Anglo-Saxons, were moving into Roman Britain from the 5th-century onwards, and occupying the fertile plains of what is now England, fringed by a Celtic world consisting of Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and Scotland. Across the Channel, Gaul was a hodgepodge of various Germanic group, until the Franks under Clovis put together a great realm encompassing almost all of modern France, as well as Belgium, Holland, and western parts of Germany; in the long run, the Franks were to have a bigger impact on the shaping of medieval Europe than any other barbarian peoples. Clovis had left the Visigoths virtually confined to Spain, where they gradually established a somewhat precarious hold of the whole peninsula. Meanwhile in Italy, the old centre of the Roman world, the Ostrogothic under their great king Theodoric fought off other Germans to rule. But this proved just the first in a kaleidoscope of invaders, that would leave the Italian Peninsula very fragmented; a situation that would last, for Italy was never united again until 1861. Modern historians tend to avoid the term "Dark Ages" for the centuries after 476, but we must be careful not to understate the scale of political, economic, and cultural collapse in Western Europe. A more primitive, more war-like, more illiterate, and more rural period was ushered in. Yet out of this confusion there began to appear entities no longer simply a collection of barbarian warbands, but peoples belonging to a recognisable state, speaking a Latin vernacular, and an emerging class of warrior-aristocracy, engaging in the politics of land. Something quite new and immeasurably more creative than Rome would eventually emerge in due course. The second inheritor was the eastern half of the empire which would continue for another thousand years, though henceforth, somewhat unhelpfully, traditionally referred to as the Byzantine Empire. The Eastern Emperors had not looked upon the changes in the West with indifference, but troubles in their own domains hamstrung them until the reign of Justinian the Great. His achievements speak for the inherent wealth of the eastern empire. Justinian was almost always at war, bringing Vandal North Africa, all of Italy, and the Mediterranean coast Visigothic Spain once more under imperial rule. A still more resonant aspect of his legacy was a lavish building program that yielded such masterpieces as the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, and a complete revision of all aspects of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis (Code of Justinian), which is still the basis of civil law in many modern states. We labour under the handicap of knowing that it did not last, so Justinian can seem something of a failure; three years after his death, the Lombards, descended upon Italy, and most of it was gone again by the end of the century. But Justinian behaved as people thought a emperor should, reuniting and restoring the old empire; after-all for a long time no one could conceive a world without it. Justinian's ineffectual successors could not maintain his legacy in the face of the most devastating epidemic to hit Europe before the Black Death, renewed barbarian pressure on the Danube, Persia rumbling towards an inevitable and chronic war, and in the mid-7th-century, a new predatory rival, Islam. A terrible time lay ahead. And the third inheritor of the Roman Empire was the Christian Church itself, with it a commitment to the written word, to record-keeping, and to the preservation of classical learning. In many places it was the sole institutional survivor of empire, west of Constantinople. Church leaders were at first slow to recognise the opportunity in disaster, but bishops were men with experience of administration, and lettered men among a new unlettered ruling-elite; it was only natural that new tasks would be thrust upon them. Moreover, in a crumbling society such as 5th-century Western Europe, the monastic ideals of undistracted service to God was attractive to many men and women of character and intellect. Thus, the circumstances arose for the Papacy to begin its rise to the splendid preeminence that would be taken for granted in the medieval world. History Western Collapse The centuries immediately following the fall of the Western Empire have traditionally been referred to as "The Dark Ages". The term was coined by the Italian humanist Petrarch (d. 1374) in the 1330s, and employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the Middle Ages' "darkness" with Renaissance' "light". As the accomplishments of the period came to be better understood in the 18th-century, historians began restricting the term to the Early Middle Ages (476-978). Today most scholars avoid it entirely due to its dismissive and judgemental connotations. The character of the period still remains the subject of a lot of historical debate, with historians tending to divide roughly into two camps, "Catastrophists" and "C''ontinuists''". For Catastrophists, ''this was the complete disappearance of a civilisation, while ''Continuists ''see merely transformation, a breakdown of the Roman political apparatus that could no longer be sustained, while Roman institutions such as the Christian Church survived. Looking back, we can see that much really did change, and if there is a historical consensus then it would tend towards a mild "''Catastrophists" view. While "The Dark Ages" is an out-dated term, we must be careful not to understate the scale of political, economic, and cultural collapse in Western Europe; Europeans are not some sort of depressed class needing historical rehabilitation. A more primitive, more war-like, more illiterate, and more rural period was ushered in. London and Paris would remain fetid firetraps with barely 25,000 inhabitants far into the Early Middle Ages. Even the greatest of medieval kings was barely more than a warlord to whom men clung for protection; or in fear of something worse. If the comparison is with Byzantne or Islamic civilisation, then Europe west of the Elbe was for centuries after the Roman collapse an almost insignificant backwater of world history. It is important to be clear from the outset is that the period between 476 and 978 was very different outside Western Europe. Roman civilisation in the east not only survived the Western collapse and then the coming of Islam, but eventually revived to enjoy one last Byzantine Golden Age (842-1025). The Muslim Arabs conquests in the first century after the Prophet Muhammad were an astonishing achievement, that remade the Middle East and Mediterranean. And conquest was only the beginning of Islam's impact on the world, for great traditions of Muslim civilization were to be built upon them, which was at its peak during the Islamic Golden Age (786-1258); an effervescence of culture and learning unlike anything seen since Classical Greece. Uncomfortable as the idea might be to some, the Islamic world probably contributed as much to dragging Western Europe out of the Dark Ages as the Church. It was only rivalled by Tang China which by the 10th-century enjoyed so much trade that coins couldn't be minted fast enough, prompting the world's first experiments with paper-money. In the Germanic invasions lie the origins of the first nations of modern Europe, though when the Western Empire disappeared the barbarian peoples did not occupy areas that looked much like later states. There is some debate about how "barbarian" the different Germanic groups were by this time. Most had spent some time in Roman provinces before establishing independent kingdoms, and had served individually and collectively in the Roman army. They often wore Roman military style clothing, and intermarried with the Roman populations they conquered and ruled. Except in the northern most provinces, they were Christians of a sort too. However, the 4th and 5th centuries were a major period of religious disagreement, with different groups arguing over the nature of God and accusing each other of heresy. The barbarian' '''peoples had almost all been converted to Arian Christianity, considered a heresy by the mainstream Church. This Romanisation made accommodation easier, and local Roman elites quickly came to terms with their new Germanic rulers, entering their courts and helping them govern in as Roman a way as possible. Nonetheless, a barbarian past left its imprint. To understand how Germainc societies worked prior to the invasions of Western Empire, what we have is archaeology, which tells us about many things but by no means all; plus the usually ill-informed views of Roman observers looking northwards from the Rhine and Danube. They reveal a settled society, rather than nomadic, farming somewhat but mostly raising cattle, with a largely independent peasantry; that is to say owing no rent to a lord, other than occasional small-scale tribute. Most of these groupings spoke related Germanic languages, although none of them saw this as marking any essential homogeneity between them. The economy was simple, though they were skilled iron-workers. Of formal culture, they brought nothing with them to compare with antiquity. The elites of society were warriors, divided into a hierarchy of ranks. Political groupings were small and simple, and often very fluid too, with identities changing as different ruling families rose and fell. Bonds of family were very important, as was a rigorous code of ethics which emphasised independence, individuality, honesty, loyalty, and bravery. And they had an exacting standard of manliness; having multiple wives was common, but there was little tolerance for homosexuality. Almost everywhere,'' society was long and irreversibly shaped by Germanic custom. The first shift was that the Germanic peoples did not call themselves "Romans". Although it seems an obvious point, this was a radical departure from barbarian warlords of the past like Stilicho or Ricimer, who wanted to rule as Romans. Germanic elites clearly saw themselves as distinct from the Romans they conquered and ruled. Indeed, in long-lasting kingdoms like Visigothic Spain and the Frankish Gaul, the reverse happened; Romans began to see themselves as Goths and Franks. The second shift is that the old unity of the west had vanished forever. Separate political systems emerged, with separate political foci; the Paris region for the early Franks, Toledo in central Spain for the Visigoths, and Milan for the Lombards, the final barbarian invaders of Italy. All three of these cities had been marginal in Roman times. The third major shift was arguably the most important. The Roman Empire was governed by a complex bureaucratic structure, with a sophisticated taxation system, used largely to pay the army, easily the Roman state’s greatest expense. The new Germanic military-élites did not want pay; they wanted to be landowners, like the provincial élites they were now dominating and living beside. Tax régimes themselves became less necessary as a result, and since they were both disliked and complex to collect, could eventually shrivel away; when Justinian reconquered North Africa and Italy, he found reintroducing Byzantine taxes hard and unpopular. Kings instead relied on the revenues from their own lands, which were very extensive everywhere. The whole economic basis of politics shifted from taxation to landowning. One important result of this was that the western provinces became less economically complex. The Roman fiscal system meant that money and goods regularly moved north from rich southern provinces such as Africa and Egypt, to the northern frontier regions where armies mostly were located. This had gone, which meant that inter-regional exchange decreased steadily, and by 700 or so was restricted to luxury goods such as wine. Nor were the aristocracies of the Early Middle Ages anywhere near as rich as those of the Roman world, and, since aristocratic demand fuelled much of the exchange inside regions, commerce at all levels lessened nearly everywhere. Roman coinage was often replaced by coins minted with the faces of Germanic kings, but for a long time there wasn't much coin about, especially of smaller denominations. Barter replaced money and a money economy emerged again only slowly. The fourth major shift was that slavery gradually disappeared throughout Western Europe. It had not been generally practiced in Germanic society, except as a punishment for certain crimes. The Church worked actively to reduce the practice of holding Christians in bondage. Another major factor was Balthild, the wife of Clovis II of the Franks (639-658), who had herself been enslaved as a young girl. On becaming regent for her son in 658, she outlawed slave-trading of Christians throughout the Frankish realm. It is difficult to be certain about the process, but the late Roman slave system slowly transmuted into serfdom. Nevertheless the slave trade in non-Christians thrived. During the eastward expansion of the Germans in the 10th-century so many Slavs were captured that term "slave" has its origins in the word "Slav". And the last significant shift was that public assemblies of the entire political community were an important feature of all the post-Roman kingdoms. They were the places where royal power and royal actions were presented to the populus, even if that was a highly élite subset of "the people", to gain its consent; justice for example was invariably done publicly, "in common council with us" as a Lombard king put it. This was true north of the Roman frontier and south of it alike; they could be found in Celtic, Slav and Scandinavian societies, as much as in Germanic ones. Public assemblies would weaken in the 10th and 11th century, and had to be recreated, but the idea of a legitimising community would remain potent, and still echoes today in the parliamentary bodies that are so characteristic of modern states. A landed military-aristocracy, illiterate elites, assembly politics, Christianity, a disappearing tax system, a simpler economic system: all these features marked out the post-Roman kingdoms. In them we can already glimpse many of the key features that would characterise the Feudal System of medieval Europe. In this structure there begins to appear Barbarian Kingdoms no longer a collection of barbarian warbands, but peoples belonging to a recognisable state, speaking a Latin vernacular adding Germanic words to it, and an emerging class of warrior-aristocracy. Out of this confusion of Germanic and Roman traditions something quite new and immeasurably more creative than Rome would emerge in due course. An early step along the journey to true civilisation was law codes, which almost all the kingdoms moved towards codifying; one of the earliest examples was the Burgundian Code (516). In comparison with instruments like the Code of Justinian (534), Germanic legislation were extremely narrow in scope; dealing almost exclusively with crime, marriage, and inheritance. The characteristic Germanic device for securing public order was Wergeld ''("man price"); men, women, cattle, and property of all kinds had in a most literal sense their price. Wrongs done were settled by compensation, or if not forthcoming by a blood feud involving a whole clan. The writing down of law codes was for future consultation only, rather than some form of publication. There's no point imagining devices such as the stone pillars of Hammurabi or Ashoka, since literacy was so rare; the Roman education system had been one of the first things to disappear. Another significent step on the journey to civilisation was interpretations of the ''barbarian role in history, which sought to reconcile traditions in which paganism was still strong, with Christianity and with the idea of Rome itself. The most famous examples were the History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours (d. 594) and the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede (d. 735). It must be said that Gregory presented a picture of the Franks which was pessimistic; he thought the Frankish rulers had behaved so badly that their kingdom was doomed. Christian Church The western Christian Church provides one of the great success stories of the Early Middle Ages. Christianity is a theme that runs through almost every aspect of medieval life; political, social, and of course religious. The network of bishops which the Romans had established in every cities, arranged in a hierarchy, province by province, was in many places the sole institutional survivor of the empire. Bishops had been important in the late Empire, but it was in the Early Middle Ages that they really became major political players. Urban life survived all across the West, except in Britain, and, as imperial administration crumbled collapsed, cities became increasingly important, and were more often than not represented by bishops, both in regards to internal politics and in relation to kings and other royal officials; bishops tended to be from leading provincial families after-all. Semi-pagan kings looked upon bishops with superstitious awe, and took them seriously as local political leaders. Cathedral churches had become rich land-holders, thanks to donation from the faithful, which put any bishop on a social par with the Germanic ruling-elites as soon as he took office. Moreover, bishops were men with experience of administration, and men-of-letters among a new unlettered ruling-class, which craved the reassurance of the classical heritage. New tasks were naturally thrust upon them. For the next thousand years, the chief advisors of European kings would often be clergymen. Eastern Christianity was not exactly the same as in the west. The hierarchy of bishops were city leaders here as well, but less prominent players in a wider politics, and emperors were more powerful in ecclesiastical affairs than rulers were in the west. At first, Church leaders had not recognised the opportunity in disaster. They long felt embattled in a semi-pagan world, while identifying with the civilization that had collapsed, rather than the one just being born. Yet the end of the Classical world had seen two new institutions emerge in the Western Church, that were to be lifelines in these dangerous rapids. The first was Christian monasticism. It traditionally begins with St. Anthony (d. 356). A wealthy young heir, he happened upon the Bible passage where Jesus indicates that to be perfect, one must make all possessions over to charity and live in poverty. He did so, living a hermit’s life on the fringes of the Egyptian desert, then moving farther into the desert to avoid admirers. Emulators in the ensuing years either kept to individual salvation, such as the Stylites of the 5th-century Palestine and Syria who would seclude themselves atop pillars, or drew themselves together into communities. This communal monasticism is what caught on in the West. In a crumbling society such as 5th-century Western Europe, the monastic ideals of undistracted service to God was attractive to many men and women of character and intellect. The institution prospered, and many of the greatest churchmen of the age were monks. One of the most influential was St. Benedict of Nursia (d. 547), an Italian monk of whom we know little except his achievement. Living in Italy during the seemingly apocalyptic Gothic War (535–554), he set up a monastery at Monte Cassino in 529, giving it a rule-book for personal spiritual improvement within a communal framework. For Benedict, ordered spiritual focus was the way: monks remaining in one location, and totally obedient to the abbot, with a rigorous daily schedule of prayer and work in the fields, to prevent idle thoughts. The Rule of St. Benedict are a seminal document of western Christianity. Its success was demonstrated by its rapid spread everywhere in the West. Benedictine monasteries became the key sources of missionaries for the conversion of pagan England and Germany, one of the most self-invigorating movements within Christendom, and a crucial conduit for the preservation of Greco-Roman learning and literature, to be rediscovered by later generations during the Renaissance. The Church’s other new great support was what would become the Papacy in Rome. Within the Roman Empire, the Church had adopted the same organisational structure as the Empire itself: archbishoprics corresponded to the imperial territorial divisions, with the bishop of the most important city overseeing the entire dioceses. Among them, five geographical foci came to hold a special preeminence: the archbishoprics of Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria. They were all theoretically equal, but it was not long before their archbishops began to assert primacy vis-à-vis each other, with Rome and Constantinople becoming the chief rivals. As the capital of the remnant of the Roman Empire, Constantinople's claim was natural. Moreover, with the precedence set by Constantine, Eastern Emperors viewed themselves as purposefully Christian sovereigns, with the duty of protecting the Church, fighting paganism, and upholding right doctrine. Rome's claim was somewhat different: its archbishop, or Pope, held that Rome had been invested with primacy over the Church by St. Peter himself. It was later claimed that Emperor Constantine granted supreme temporal and spiritual power to the Papacy, based on a document known as the Donation of Constantine; today recognised as one of the greatest forged documents of history. With the fall of the Western Empire, the circumstances arose for the Papacy to begin its rise to the splendid preeminence that would be taken for granted in the medieval world. To begin with there was the city itself; Rome had been seen for centuries as the capital of the world. Even more important was the fact that Rome was the only great bishoprics in the West, and the only one outside the Byzantine Empire. Bishops of cities throughout Christendom had long resisted claims of primacy by the five great bishoprics, but in a world turned upside-down by pagan or heretical barbarians, the Western bishops became more willing to accept Rome’s claim; there would gradually emerge a true hierarchy in the West with the papacy at the top. The pope in whom the future medieval papacy is most clearly revealed was Pope Gregory the Great (590-604). He was the first pope to come from a monastic background, thus bringing together the two great institutional supports of the early Church. A Roman aristocrat and a statesman of great insight, Gregory was the first pope to fully accepted the barbarian Europe in which he reigned. He was the doughtiest opponent of the Arian heresy, and was delighted by the conversion of the Visigothic Spain to mainstream Christianity. He oversaw the first great missionary campaign, one of whose targets was pagan England, to which he sent St. Augustine of Canterbury in 596. He also reasserted Papal authority over the bishops of Italy, France, and Spain. Gregory reigned in the wake of the Lombard invasions of 568. Not only did they cut him off from the Byzantine representative at Ravenna, but he had to negotiate with them when they stood before the walls of Rome; making a truce with the Lombards in 592, and directing defenses when war re-ignited the following year. Like other bishops in the West, he assumed temporal control over Rome, feeding his city and governing it; the roots of the later Papal State. Significantly, Gregory did not speak Greek; nor did he feel he needed to. He resented interference in the Church from Constantinople, as much as from barbarian kings, beginning the subtle shift of the West Church towards a self-conscious independence. Gregory was canonized by popular acclaim immediately after his death. Meanwhile the 4th and 5th century was a major period of doctrinal disputes, with different groups arguing over the nature of God, and accusing one another of heresy. The quarrels for the most part revolved around the mysteries at the very heart of the faith: how to reconcile Jesus' dual nature, both divine and human; and the precise relationship of God the Father to God the Son and the Holy Spirit. Familiar concepts such as the Trinity, "one God in three Divine Persons", were only very gradually accepted as the most satisfactory answer. There is more to these questions than appears at first sight. In a secular age such as ours, it requires an effort to recall that behind the hair-splitting of theologians lay a concern of appalling importance; nothing less than the salvation of mankind from damnation. Doctrinal disputes could rarely be reconciled by compromise, and could world history just as powerfully as the movements of armies. The first to emerge has been called Arianism, after the Alexandrian priest Arius (d. 336) who enunciate the doctrine that Christ was distinct from God and therefore subordinate to Him. A controversy ensued, necessitating the Council of Nicaea (325), presided over by Emperor Constantine himself, where the Arius' ideas were condemned, though the Church vacillated for the next 50-years, and only in 381 was Arianism definitively and finally condemned as heresy. It never caught on in the West Roman Empire and was eventually suppressed by the mainstream Church in the East, but not before the Goths were converted to Christianity by the Arian priest Ulfilas (d. 383); other barbarian groups followed suit, including the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Vandals, and Lombards. Borne by these Germanic nations, Arianism was to survive in the West until the 7th-century. The Germanic elites long-clung to the heresy at least in part to maintain their ethnic and cultural distinction from the Romans they had conquered and ruled; giving up Ariansim was analogous to surrendering national identity. From the 420s, another controversy known as Monophysitism particularly wracked Eastern Christianity. Upon becoming archbishop of Constantinople in 428, Nestorius (d. 450) weighed in on a deliciously subtle disagreement about how the eternally divine Christ become incarnate as a transient man. While Nestorius was forced to resign his position, Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, softened his stand and remained bishop. Emperor Marcian took an interest in the matter, and Monophysitism was condemned as heresy at the Council of Chalcedon (451). Though a defeat for the Egyptian clerics, the new orthodoxy never took hold there, and provoked long-standing socio-political disruptions within the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople's stuttering efforts to accommodate her Monophysite minority would cause many of the early quarrels with Rome, that ultimately ended in the Great Schism of 1054; the permanent sundering of Christendom into the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Monophysitism also in partly facilitated the conquest of Egypt by the armies of Islam in the 7th-century, where it later matured into the Coptic Church that still exists today. A third prominent heresy was the Celtic Church in Ireland, although strictly speaking this wasn't a theological heresy at all. Christian Ireland was isolated and cut-off from Rome, and it's structure evolved differently. Since there were few town that could be called cities, there was no tradition of bishops, and the Celtic Church developed a very decentralised structure based around the great monasteries. This ultimately played a part in the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1175, which Pope Adrian IV (d. 1159) authorised in order to bring Ireland back into the Catholic fold. British Isles Britain was one of the first provinces to be abandoned by the Romans in 407. Of cultural continuity there is virtually no trace; Romano-British civilization disappeared more completely here than anywhere else in the former imperial West. Towns were abandoned, trade declined precipitously, and artisanal production beyond the village level ceased almost completely. Christianity, whatever it may have been, disappeared, until reintroduced by another Rome; not the empire but the Papacy. Even the language was to go, replaced almost completely by a Germanic tongue. The Roman heritage of the future Britain was purely physical. It lay in the ruins of towns and villas, or the great constructions like Hadrian’s Wall, which were to puzzle newcomers until they came to be believed were the work of giants of superhuman power. Some of these relics, like the complex of baths built upon thermal springs at Bath, disappeared from sight for hundreds of years until rediscovered in the 18th-century. Britain's post-Roman power vacuum did not go unnoticed. The Romano-British inhabitants soon came under successive bands of pagan invaders or migrants from north-western continental Europe. Chief among the Germanic groups where the Saxons who originally occupied the region which is today the North Sea coast of the Netherlands and north western Germany, and the Angles of modern-day southern Denmark, as well as the Jutes of north Denmark. It speaks for their success that the word "England" derives from the Old English for "land of the Angles", that the Welsh word for the English is Saeson (Saxon), and that the term Anglo-Saxon is today synonymous with someone who is ethnically English. A significant date in post-Roman Britain is the Groans of the Britons (446), an appeal for assistance to Flavius Aetius, leading general of the Western Empire; none was forthcoming. Another is the Battle of Deorham (577), after which the significant cities of Bath, Cirencester, and Gloucester fell and the Anglo-Saxons reached the western sea. By the 600s, all the fertile plains of what is now England were occupied by Anglo-Saxons, fringed by the Celtic world of Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, and Ireland. During the settlement period the lands were fragmented into dozens of petty-kingdoms, but during the 7th century, they graduallly coalesced - through the usual processes of warfare, marriage and inheritance - into roughly seven stable kingdoms, often referred to as the Heptarchy. In the wake of these invasions, Romano-British Christianity retreated to the misty fastnesses of mountainous Wales and isolated Cornwall. We may have a fleeting glimpse of the last spasms of resistance in the legend of King Arthur and his knights. According to the sparse contemporary source, the Anglo-Saxon advance was briefly halt by a local warlord called Ambrosius Aurelianus at the Battle of Badon (c. 500); in the earliest version of the story, Arthur is associated with that battle. Wales and Cornwall had been among the least Romanised parts of the Britain, prized their mineral wealth more than anything else; there were numerous Roman forts but only one significant town, Caerwent in South Wales. While Latin had been the official language of Roman Britain, Celtic tongues still dominated, early forms of Welsh and Cornish. Yet the Roman legacy of Christianity survived in Wales and revived during the Age of the Saints (500-700), with monastic settlements established throughout the country, by religious leaders such as St. David, the patron saint of Wales. While the Romans balked at the challenge of conquering Ireland, this is not to say that the Irish were unaware of their powerful neighbour. Although Ireland's patron saint St Patrick (d. 461) gets all the credit, Ireland was Christianised by a series of missionaries from Roman Britain in the 4th and 5th centuries, based on long-established commercial and cultural interactions. In Ireland, political units were in general very small and unstable for a long time; even in 9th-century, there were up to 150 petty-kingdoms. Far from the new Christian Church acting as a basis for political aggregation, its hierarchy was as fragmented as was the secular political structure. It was not based on bishops of cities as elsewhere, for Irish had few urban centres that could be called cities until the arrival of the Vikings. Instead monasteries were important in Ireland from early on, including Clonmacnoise, Glendalough, Clonard, and Lismore, among others. While the 6th-century was an age of imperial and cultural collapse for most of Western Europe, for the Celtic Church in Ireland it was a Golden Age. Along with faith came literacy with the clergy developing a written form of the native Celtic tongue, as well as major cultural transformation. Embracing the new Latin culture with a fervor typical of a new-comer, Irish clerics excelled in the study of classical philosophy, Christian theology, and ironically Latin grammar; because they consciously learned Latin as a foreign language it remained pure from the vulgar Latin spoken in Roman provinces. The arts of manuscript illumination, metalworking, and sculpture flourished, producing such treasures as the Book of Kells and the many carved stone crosses that still dot the "island of saints and scholars". One distinctive tradition of the Celtic Church was the popularity of "exile for Christ", a form of penance reminiscent of Egyptian and Syrian hermits. Since desert could hardly be found in Ireland, this usually took the form of physical withdrawal to a severe form of ascetic life on rocks and small islands off the coast, most dramatically illustrated by sites such as Skelig Michael in the south-west. But withdrawal could also be achieved by self-imposed exile entirely from Ireland on missionary endeavours to convert (or be martyred by) the pagans. This was the mainspring of the whole movement of Irish missionary activity to Britain and to the continent. The best known of the continental Irish monastic founders is St. Columbanus (d. 615), who established foundations as far away as Italy. Scotland’s most famous missionary was the Irish abbot St. Columba (d. 597). At this time there were at least three distinct ethnic groups in the northern-most part of the British Isles: the longest established Picts in the north and east; the Gaelic-speaking Scots in the west resulting from a gradual Irish immigration; and Celtic Britons in the south. Columba founded the great monastery of Iona in the Inner Hebrides, and Christianity became popular with pagan kings as it seemed to offer them supernatural powers. There are many stories of miracles that Columba supposedly performed, the most famous being his encounter with what is today known as the Loch Ness Monster. In 595, Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) sent missionaries to England led by St. Augustine (d. 604) to revive the faith. Although Kent was one of the smallest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, it was there he had his first success; he was the first archbishop of Canterbury, today the most senior cleric in England. Missionaries from Rome soon found themselves competing with Irish missionaries from the Celtic Church. The most important of the Irish missionary to England was St. Aidan (d. 651), who restored Christianity to Northumbria, travelled ceaselessly throughout northern and central England spreading the gospel, and still had time to found the great monastery at Lindisfarne. The differences between the two churches were slight and procedural, rather than weighty matters of doctrine, concerning such details as how a monk's head should be shaved, and above all the correct way of calculating the date of Easter; the Roman Church had further distanced itself from Judaism by adopting a solar calendar in 455, while the isolated Celtic Church still retained the old lunar method of calculation. The crucial concern was whether the English Church should be subordinate to Rome. The issue was decided at the Synod of Whitby (664), where the king of Northumbria came down on the side of Rome; other Anglo-Saxons followed his example, as did those in Scottish and Welsh eventually. After 670, Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury (d. 690), a Byzantine appointed by the Pope, did something which no Irish church leader could dream of yet; he united the bishops of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into a single hierarchy. It was a symbolic choice, determining that the future England would be fully religiously, culturally and politically integrated into the rest of continental Europe. On the other hand, Ireland retained the distinctive practices of the Celtic Church well into the 12th-century, which ultimately played a part in the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1175, which the pope authorised to bring Ireland back into the mainstream fold. France, Germany and Spain Across the English Channel, things were very different; much of the Roman survived. When imperial authority finally crumbled, Gaul lay in the shadow of the Visigothic Kingdom (418-720), long established in Aquitaine. Their prominent role in repelling Attila the Hun in 451 gave them greater importance than ever, and they energetically extended their territory over much of south-western France, as well as campaigning south of the Pyrenees, though Spain was at first of secondary importance. Aside from the Visigoths, Gaul was shared by several Germanic kingdoms: in the north-east, the Franks were the dominant political and military power on both sides of the lower Rhine; in the south-east, the Burgundians were settled in the Rhône valley and the area running east to modern Geneva; another group, the Alemanni occupied Alsace on the upper Rhine, between the Franks and Burgundians; and in the north-west, British migrants fleeing the Anglo-Saxon invasions had established themselves in Brittany. Meanwhile, in the north, a rump state of the Western Empire survived the fall as Roman Soissons (457-486), established by Aegidius (464), the last Roman general in northern Gaul. As is evident from the works of the writers like Sidonius Apollinaris (d. 490), the economy and lifestyle of Gaul remained remarkably resilient, and the Gallo-Roman cultural legacy was bequeathed intact to the successor-kingdoms. This influence was strongest among the Visigoths and Burgundians, who had lived within the empire for a longer time and were to varying degrees Romanised; both were Christians of a sort. Somewhat ironically, the Gallo-Roman population often viewed the still pagan Franks and Alemanni more favourably, since they had not been converted by the heretical Arian branch of Christianity. It was the Franks 'who would have a more profound impact on the shaping of Europe than any other ''barbarian people; France owes its name to the Latin version of Franks, and Charlemagne (d. 814 AD), the towering figure of early medieval Europe, was a Frank. The Byzantines came to use "Frank" to mean all of Western European, and it caught on elsewhere; distorted and mispronounced versions were still being used from Persia to China well into the 16th-century. Prior to the beginning of the large-scale barbarian invasions of 406, the Franks were already settled on the Rhine frontier, in what is today Belgium and Holland. They did not raid Gaul substantially, and the Romans found them useful as auxiliaries (foederati), allowing them to settle on the west side of the great river too. As Roman power withered, the Franks gradually expanded westwards, taking the city of Tournai sometime in the 440s. Of the Germanic groups that conquered a slice of the Roman world in the 5th century, the Franks were among the least Romanised; they did not adopt Christianity, and remained polytheistic pagans. And they were not by any means a unified people, and there were several separate Frankish petty-kingdoms on both sides of the Rhine up to the late 5th-century, based around cities such as Tournai, Cologne, Arras, and Cambrai, among others. The rise of the Franks began with 'Clovis I '(481-511), the third king of the ruling family at Tournai subsequently called Merovingian Dynasty (457-752); named for his grandfather Merovech, who is said to have fought alongside the Romans at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. At 16-years-old, Clovis inherited a modest kingdom, and the expectations that he would continue his father's efforts at expansion. The young king wasted little time in establishing himself as a force to be reckoned with. Allying with two other Frankish kings, he marched on the Roman rump-state of Soissons, landing a decisive victory at the Battle of Soissons (486), and extending Frankish territory west to the Seine and south to the Loire. Clovis soon fell out with his allies, and the next decade was spent in obscure campaigns eliminating his rival Frankish kings, through an unscrupulous blend of warfare and intrigue. Having united all of the Franks under a single king for the first time, he went on to defeat the Alemanni on the upper Rhine in 596, expanding his kingdom further. The next important step for the Franks was Clovis' marriage to a Burgundian princess. Though her own people were Arians, she was a mainstream Christian, and, at some time after the marriage, Clovis himself embraced the faith. The story of his conversion follows a classic Christian trope, involving a victory on the battlefield rather reminiscent of Constantine’s conversion; traditionally the victory over the Alemanni in 496. The kings baptism by the bishop of Reims was followed immediately by the mass-baptism of 3,000 of his warriors; for more than a 1,000 years, the Cathedral of Reims would be the traditional site of the coronation of French kings. There was no doubt political motives for his conversion: mainstream Christianity was the way to the loyalty of his Gallo-Roman subjects, and gave him the support of the Christian Church, the supreme relic of empire west of Constantinople. Gallo-Roman bishops cooperated with the Franks, sparing the realm the protracted religious discord that effected most of the other Germanic kingdoms. Inspired by his newfound religious zeal, Clovis moved in force against the Arian Visigoths in south-western Gaul, whose ruler Alaric II (484–507) had been exiling bishops unwilling to cooperate with his heretical version of the faith. Crossing the Loire, he sacked Visigothic cities, and defeated and killed Alaric at the Battle of Vouille (507), effectiving forced them out of Gaul. Clovis was now the successor of the Romans in all Gaul, except for Burgundy in the south-east, Brittany in the north-west, and a narrow strip along the Mediterranean coast retained by the Visigoths. The Eastern Emperor Anastasius recognised this, bestowing on Clovis an honorary Consulship. His kingdom also stretched into Belgium, Holland, and western Germany, which had never been part of the Roman Empire. The Frankish capital was moved to Paris by Clovis, and he was buried in the church he had built there; the first Frankish king not to be buried as a barbarian. To the French people, Clovis is considered the first king of France. But this was not the start of the continuous history of France, nor Paris as a capital. Upon Clovis' death, according to the Frankish custom, the kingdom was divided among his four sons, a pattern that would be repeated in subsequent generations. Merovingian success nevertheless continued; they managed among them to conquer Burgundy, to keep other barbarians out of Gaul, to take their lands in Bavaria, and to incorporate Provence profiting from the Ostrogothic invasion of Italy in 488. In northern Germany, they frequently clashed with the Saxons, and occasionally turned them into tribute payers, but never for long. This record of conquest across multiple generations is striking, and established the Frankish realm as by far the strongest power in the post-Roman west. But the system of divided inheritance weakened the Merovingian kings in the long-term. This system of succession was unique in the post-Roman world, but all the Barbaric Kingdoms had their own idiosyncratic method; in Vandal north Africa for instance the eldest member of the royal family inherited the entire kingdom. The practice of primogeniture, the firstborn legitimate son inheriting the entire realm, only becoming widespread centuries later. Frankish rulers, brothers and cousins, were prone to quarrelling over ill-defined borders, and internecine fighting was endemic. The entire realm was reunited by Clovis' youngest son in 558, after the death of his brothers, only to break-up again a few years later. There was only one long period of unity, under Clotaire II (613-29) and his son Dagobert I (629-39), during the whole two centuries of the dynasty. The Frankish realm gradually settled down in four relatively stable sub-kingdoms: Austrasia in the north-east with its capital at Metz; Neustria in the north-west centred on Soissons; Aquitaine in the south-west centred on Toulouse; and Burgundy in the south-east centred on Lyon. Even when Clotaire II reestablish Frankish unity, he only united the kingdom, not its four royal courts. Each became the focus for aristocratic manoeuvring and developed a distinct character; Austrasia and Neustria tended to feud, with Burgundy often playing peacemaker, while Aquitaine remained aloof. Endemic warfare ultimately resulted in power steadily seeped away from the Merovingian kings towards the warrior-aristocracy, upon whom they relied for military support. In the 8th-century, it was from the most powerful of these nobles that there emerged the Carolingian Dynasty, which would bring the Frankish realm to its peak under Charlemagne. The '''Visigoths had not yet gained full control of Spain when Clovis seized most of their territory in Gaul in 507. Another Germanic peoples were already settled there, the Suebi, who had established themselves in the north-west, while the indigenous Basques in the north steadfastly opposed all attempts at subjugation. The origin of the Basques is something of a mystery, since their language is unrelated to the Indo-European language family; they have long been thought to represent the native people that occupied Europe even before the migrations of Indo-Europeans during prehistory. The first half of the 6th-century was difficult for the Visigoths. The rugged landscape and isolated valleys of Spain, where local loyalties were strong, presented quite special problems to centralised rule, as it has continued to do to all invaders and governments; Muslim Spain for instance would never be able to dislodge the Christian kingdoms of the north. The rule of long-haired Visigoths with a penchant for gaudy jewelry - and there were not so very many of them, less than 200,000 at most - over perhaps one million Hispano-Romans was precarious, especially as religious tension between mainstream Christianity and Arianism meant they fused with the existing population much less than had the Franks. After the death of King Alaric II against Clovis in 507, the Visigoths then quarrelled so much that Byzantine rule was able to re-establish itself in the south from 552. Visigothic unity was restored under Liuvigild (569-86) who conquered nearly all the Iberian Peninsula including the Suebi and Byzantine Cordoba; all except the Basquelands of the north and a Byzantine coastal strip which held-out until the 620s. Liuvigild saw himself as a unifier in all respects, and issued a law code that contained the most Roman influenced legislation of any of the Barbarian Kingdom, in which equal rights were granted to his Visigothic and Hispano-Roman subjects for the first time. His son Reccared (586–601) went further, resolving the religious tension by immediately becoming a mainstream Christian, and outlawing Arianism altogether at the Council of Toledo (589); thus began the long tradition of Catholic monarchy in Spain. Everything seemed so serious to the Visigoths. The impulse to unity in Spain henceforth took on a highly religious element, as it never did in Francia or Italy; they had reached their eighteenth ecumenical council by 702. One result of this was that the kings passed increasingly unpleasant laws persecuting Jews, the only substantial religious minority left; easily the most extreme anti-Semitic legislation anywhere in Europe until the 12th-century. They were never able to establish a long-lasting dynasty, and the process of succession to the throne was very tense at best; at worst violent. When one ended in regicide and civil war in 710, it invited disaster; the Muslim conquest of Spain. Byzantine Empire (457-518 AD) By tradition, the Eastern Roman Empire is henceforth referred to as the Byzantine Empire '(330-1453). However, even in their decline. Byzantine prestige had amazed strangers who felt through them the weight of an imperial past. Until the end its emperors were Augusti and its citizens called themselves "Romans". The term comes from Byzantium, the original name of the city rebuilt by Constantine under the new name of Constantinople (today Istanbul). It first came into use in the mid-16th-century and evokes all the prejudices of that time. In the midst of the Renaissance, Europeans were enamored with their Greco-Roman heritage, but saw the whole Middle Ages as dark and barbaric; the Byzantines were thus unworthy of the glorious title of “Romans”. The fall of the Western Empire certainly changed Constantinople, but the Romans had reinvented their empire numerous times; the Rome that went into the Punic Wars, or the reign of Augustus, or the Crisis of the 3rd-Century, or the reign of Constantine the Great, was not the same Rome that came out, but it was still Rome. At the same time, it is hard not to sense an attempt to condone the hostile rivalry that the West developed with Byzantium; made up of equal parts envy and disgust. That the Eastern Empire had for centuries absorbed much of the Islamic punishment which might otherwise have fallen on the West, would not save her when the Latin Christendom revealed itself as a predator too. Centuries later, authors were still writing of Byzantium in the same vein; here is a quote from historian William Lecky (d. 1903), "''Of that Byzantine empire, the universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed. There has been no other enduring civilization so absolutely destitute of all forms and elements of greatness, and none to which the epithet "mean" may be so emphatically applied ... The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude.." Unfortunately this view very much persists in the popular imagination today. It is futile to not to use the term, but we should remember that when Constantinople finally fell in 1453, it truly was the end of two thousand years of continuous Roman history. The Byzantine Emperors had not seen the fall of the Western Empire with indifference, but troubles of their own were more than enough to deal with in the 5th-century. The eastern half of the empire was dominated by its barbarian generals too, which only began to change under Emperor Leo I (457-474), the first of four capable rulers who would oversee its survival. When the ineffectual Theodosian line had finally petered-out in 450 after almost a century, Leo was the last of a series of emperors placed on the throne by Aspar (d. 471), a general of Alan-Goth descent and the true chief in Constantinople. Aspar thought Leo would be an easy puppet ruler, but the new emperor soon chafed under his tutelage, and sought allies in another influential group within the legions, the Isaurians. Isauria was a rugged isolated region in the Taurus mountains of central Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), with a reputation for barbarous warlike folk, and still retaining their old tribal structure under chieftains. But they had been conquered all the way back in the 1st-century BC under the Republic, and were indisputably Romans. The price of the alliance was the marriage of Leo's daughter to their chieftain, Tarasicodissa; the future Emperor Zeno. Leo's moment to strike came in the aftermath of the immensely costly failed attack on Vandal North Africa in 468. Aspar was tainted by the fiasco, and, fearing for his position, plotted to assassinate Zeno in 469, though it was thwarted at the last minute. Afterwards, Leo summoned Aspar and his son to the palace, where they were killed by the palace guards, thus allowing Zeno and the Isaurians to firmly supplant them in the army leadership. When Leo died, he was succeeded by his son-in-law '''Zeno the Isaurian (474-491); initially as regent for his own young son, until the boy's death a year later. Zeno's 17-year reign was stormy throughout. The first half was plagued by revolts, that culminated in 475 with Zeno fleeing his capital for the Taurus mountains. A usurper ruled in Constantinople for 20-months, but proved so disastrous that Zeno was able to recover his throne. The final years of Zeno's rule were filled with one of the religious controversies so common in Byzantine history. He attempted to affect a compromise between the mainstream Eastern Church and the Monophysite heresy dominant in Byzantine Egypt. But doctrinal disputes within the early Church could rarely be reconciled by compromise, and Zeno's solution was so spectacularly unsuccessful that it provoked a 35-year schism between the archbishops of Constantinople and Rome; an early step in the tragic relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity that would end in a permanent breach with the Great Schism in 1054. Zeno's reign also witnessed the final end of the Western Empire following the overthrow of Romulus Augustus by the Germanic general Odoacer. Odoacer tried to claim that he rule in Italy merely as governor for Constantinople, but presented it as a fait accompli, ''and Zeno was uncomfortable with this arrangement. With his own throne so shaky, the emperor could do nothing about it, until an effective replacement presented itself in Theodoric of the Ostrogoths. The collapse of the Huns in the 450s had led to further violent upheaval in the lands north of the Danube, during which the Ostrogoths had migrated ''en masse to the Byzantine side of the great river. They spent the next few years alternating between supporting the emperors against rebels, and revolting against them in search of food, plunder, and better offices in the Roman system. In 488, Zeno convinced their brilliant leader Theodoric (d. 536) to enter his service; to unseat Odoacer and rule Italy in his name. Theodoric would get a rich fertile land for his people, while Zeno got rid of the troublesome Ostrogoths forever. Over the next five years, Theodoric steadily reduced Odoacer to his capital of Ravenna, which was put to siege in 493. Unable to take the city, a banquet was held claiming to herald peace negotiations, during which Theodoric killed Odoacer with his own hand. The Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy (493-540) was thus establish in the former Western Empire's most prosperous province, both economically and culturally. By all accounts, Theodoric the Great ruled Italy both wisely and well for the next 33 years, making his reign popular and administrating it better than any predecessor back to the 410s. He even recommenced the old bread dole in Rome and other major cities. Theodoric never deviates from his arrangement to rule in Zeno's name. "Our royalty is an imitation of yours, a copy of the only Empire on earth", he once wrote to the emperor in Constantinople from his capital in Ravenna. On his coins appeared the legend "Unvanquished Rome". In effect, Theodoric had a duel role, as provincial governor in Italy for Constantinople and as king of his own people. The Ostrogoths were vastly outnumbered by native Italians, and the two groups largely kept themselves apart, a tendency reinforced by their different faiths; the Goths were followers of the Arian heresy, while the peoples they ruled were mainstream Christians. The civilian administration was retained and continued to be staffed almost exclusively by Romans. Two of them, Boethius (d. 530s) and Cassiodorus (d. 585), were probably the most important thinkers through whom the legacy of the classical world passed to medieval Europe; the former translated much of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, while the later conceived of the idea that monks should preserve classical learning. On the other hand, the army and all military offices remained the exclusive preserve of Ostrogoths. His forces were equal to all challenges of the day, while maintaining good relations with other Barbarian Kingdoms; his daughters married a Visigothic king, a Burgundian prince, and a Vandal king, while he himself married the sister of Frankish King Clovis. The arrangement suited everyone, even the Papacy in Rome, since Theodoric made no attempt to interfere in Church affairs; "We cannot order a religion, because no one can be forced to believe against his will." Yet after his death in 526, Theoderic's achievement quickly collapsed under his inadequate successors, eventually provoking the invasion of Italy by Justinian the Great in 535. Meanwhile, Zeno's great legacy was not that the empire prospered, but that it survived, and now with the army firmly under imperial control. On his death, it was left to his widow, daughter of Leo I, to pick a successor. Amidst clamour in Constaninople with the mobs crying, "give the Empire an Orthodox Emperor, give the Empire a Roman Emperor", she chose the aged minister of finance, Anastasius (491-518), a native Byzantine of impeccable lineage. His ascension did provoke a brief revolt among the Isaurians under Zeno's brother, but, once suppressed, he brought the Byzantines a long reign during which the empire was at peace, except for a brief clash with Sassanid Persia (502–505). Anastasius proved himself an able administrator, and energetic reformer. He perfected the monetary reforms started by Diocletian and Constantine by introducing a new stable copper coinage, the coin used in most everyday transactions; Constantine’s gold coin had only really benefited the very wealthy. This had many positive effects: it allowed the return of taxation to hard currency rather than kind, making it much easier to crack-down on corruption; soldiers pay returned to hard currency, attracting native Byzantines back to service in the legions; and middle-class merchants began to thrive again. His greatest legacy to the empire was the huge treasury that he left for Justinian to exploit. Byzantines under Justinian (518-565 AD) On the death of Anastasius without an heir, Justin I (518-527), the well-respected commander of the Praetorian Guard, was able to secure his election as the new Emperor. As a career soldier with little knowledge of statecraft, Justin wisely surrounded himself with competent advisors, the most prominent of which was his nephew and heir, the future Justinian the Great (527-565). Technically he was not appointed co-emperor until a year before his uncle's death, but most historians, both contemporary and modern, date his effective control of the state to much earlier. For instance, we find Justinian writing to the Pope in Rome in 521, to successfully settle the schism which had exist since the reign of Emperor Zeno. Around 522, Justinian met and became captivated by Theodora, a strong-willed woman of humble birth; the daughter of a bear-keeper who became an actress and probably courtesan. Marrying outside the aristocratic class scandalised polite society, but somehow Justinian persuaded his uncle to allow their marriage in 525. Two years later, the.pair were crowned Emperor and Empress, and would share an almost equal role in running the empire. And it was a most splendid reign, with an explosion of power, conquest, and culture. Justinian came to power full of energy, full of ideas, and full of confidence; his tireless work-ethic earned him the nickname, "the emperor who never sleeps". Nevertheless, he could very well have lost his throne early in his reign. Despite the secure fiscal base built up by his predecessors, Justinian had big plans to restore the Roman Empire to its former glory. To fund his wars, his chief adviser, John the Cappadocian, streamlined the tax system, introducing new taxes which the rich could not evade, and led a personal crusade against corruption. None of this made the government more popular, especially because of John's debauched lifestyle. The embittered former official John Lydos attacked him in amazing terms as physically gross, corrupt, greedy, and a bisexual predator; all the tropes available to classical rhetoricians piled up together. Public discontent finally boiled over in the Nika Riots (532). The direct cause of the riots was an incident at the chariot races in Constantinople; "Nika, Nika!" (win, win!) was the tradition cry the Hippodrome. By the 6th-century, chariot racing had a dominant role in Byzantine society, inspiring fanatical enthusiasm, and frequent brawls between the supporters of the two teams. When a violent clash spilled-out into the city-streets, Justinian punished both factions. Seven ringleaders were to be executed, but two escaped, one from each faction, and found refuge monastery. Unwilling to assault a monastery, the incident quickly got out of control. For the first time in history, the two factions were united in common cause against the Emperor. For five days, they rampaged through the streets of Constantinople, looting and burning every building they could force their way into. Justinian even contemplated fleeing his capital, but Theodora shamed him into staying to fight it out, famously saying "the imperial purple makes a fine burial shroud". It took two full days for the imperial legions to finally restored order from the most violent riots in city's history; tens-of-thousands of people were left dead and nearly half the city was a smouldering ruins. But instead of seeing this as a disaster, the young emperor saw it as the perfect opportunity to cement his legacy in stone; to rebuild the city on a grand scale. Its material monuments were lavish; the greatest in Constantinople itself, but all over the empire public buildings, churches, baths and new towns mark the reign, including two famous mosaics of Justinian and Theodora in Ravenna. The crowning glory was the Basilica of the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom). Its design by the architects Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles called for a structure unlike any other: a square floor-plan formed by four great arches, that supported a symphony of half-domes culminating in a massive central dome 107 feet across. The inside was adorned throughout by gold mosaics, a 50-feet-long high alter of solid-silver encrusted with gold and precious stones, and all lit by innumerable gold lamps. The effect led one stunned observer to say, "we knew not whether we were in heaven or earth, for on earth there is no such vision nor beauty, and we do not know how to describe it; we know only that there God dwells among men". The entire building was completed with triumphant skill just 5-years, 10-months, and 4-days after the laying of the first stone; centuries later it would take more than a century to build Notre-Dame de Paris. Hagia Sophia remained the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years, until the Cathedral of Saint Mary in Seville was completed in 1520. Meanwhile, Justinian was already busy with another typically ambitious project, having befriended an extraordinary lawyer named Tribonian (d. 542). Roman law was a chaotic morass of a thousand years of confusing and often conflicting rulings. Together these two men set about a complete revision of all aspects of Roman law, removing the obsolete and contradictory, and clarify what remained in comprehensive and concise terms. The result, the Corpus Juris Civilis ("Code of Justinian"), was published in three parts between 529 and 534, and continued to form the basis of Byzantine law until its fall in the 15th century. The code went into effect in all those territories reclaimed during Justinian's wars, including Italy. It was then rediscovered in the 11th-century when the Western Church was codifying Canon Law, which in turn became the basis for legal systems throughout Western Europe. It also passed to Eastern Europe and Russia through direct Byzantine influence. As late as 1804, the legal thinking behind the Code of Justinian served as the backbone of the famous Napoleonic Code, the single largest legal reform of the modern age. It remains influential to this day. Justinian's own legislation focused on protection against the abuses of the powerful, for instance a husband could not take on a major debt without his wife's consent. The indefatigable Justinian was almost always at war. The story of his military achievements is really the story of his greatest general, Belisarius (d. 565); a man who historian Edward Gibbon called the Scipio Africanus of the Byzantine Empire. Belisarius was a natural leader of men, and his talents were quickly recognised; he was overall commander of the eastern provinces at just 25 years-old. After over a century of relative peace in the east, conflict with Sassanid Persia was rumbling once again, when the power of the shahs revived under Kavadh I (498–531). His reign marks the beginning of the Sassanids so-called Second Golden Age (498-622), and there would be near-continuous hostilities between the two empires until 591. The first war erupted when the ruler of Georgian Iberia, a small buffer state to the north of Armenia, switched his allegiance from Persia to the Byzantines; the Byzantine-Persian War (526-532). After a series of inconclusive clashes, in 530 Kavadh launched a major assault on the strategically important Roman fortress of Dara on the upper Euphrates. Belisarius demonstrated his brilliance, by winning a stunning victory over a Sassanid force almost twice the size. The next year, the Sassanids attempted to turn the tide by invading Syria, but Belisarius' rapid response foiled the plan, fighting them to a stalemate at the Battle of Callinicum (531) with heavy losses on both side. This was soon followed by a new peace treaty in 532, a so-called "Eternal Peace" in which Justinian agreed to pay an annual tribute to Persia; the peace would last just eight years. With his eastern frontier secure, Justinian was ready to fulfill his greatest vision; the reconquest of the West. He first dispatched Belisarius to the Vandal Kingdom of north Africa; not only would this punish them for the sack of Rome in 455, but rid the Mediterranean of Vandal pirates. Victory in the Vandalic War (533-534) came with surprising ease. As long as their great king Genseric (d. 477) had ruled, the Vandal Kingdom was secure but after his death it declined swiftly. In an unusual system of succession, the elder member of the ruling family ascended to the throne, and subsequent kings tended to lack vigour. Moreover relations between the devoted Arian Christian Vandals and their mainstream Christina populace were particularly poor; religious clashes were more intense in north Africa than in any of the other Barbarian Kingdoms. Belisarius sailed for north Africa with barely 16,000 men, but caught the Vandals completely off-guard, with much of their forces away dealing with a revolt in Sardinia; a revolt that had been encouraged by Justinian. Landing unopposed, Belisarius marched on Carthage, where he defeated the Vandals in battle just outside the city-walls and took the city; the Vandals had no answer to the Byzantine cavalry largely made up of Hunnic mercenaries. The Vandals did manage to regroup and fight on for another year, but the Vandal king was eventually forced to surrender. He was treated honourably and allowed to go into exile, but the Vandals henceforth disappeared as an historical force. The wealthy territory of north Africa, the former breadbasket of the Western Empire, thus became a Byzantine province, and remained so for over a century until the Muslim conquests of the late 7th-century. The recovery however was incomplete: hostilities with the Moorish tribesmen of the desert interior would trouble the new province for the next decade or so. The rapid success in north Africa encouraged Justinian to press on to the ultimate goal; bringing Italy back under direct imperial rule. Technically the Ostrogoths were ruling Italy as Byzantine allies, so a pretext for the invasion had to be found. Fortunately, one was provided by the succession crises that followed Theodoric's death in 526. Initially, Theodoric's daughter Amalasuntha was regent for her young son, but on the boy's death, a nephew usurped the throne, and imprisoned Amalasuntha; according to official Byzantine sources, she had been assured by Justinian of imperial protection. The Gothic War (535–554) would be long and costly, in part because the Ostrogoths had not alienated the Italian populous as the Vandal had done. With imperial resources now overstretched, Belisarius invaded Italy with barely 8,000 men. Nevertheless, the campaign got off to a good start. He conquered Sicily with barely an effort, then crossed over to the mainland, and took most of the south, including the great city of Naples. Advancing north, Belisarius found only sporadic resistance, and was able to take Rome in December 536. However gaining Rome was one thing, holding it was another. The Ostrogoths had finally regrouped under a new king, Vitiges (d. 542), who was able to besiege the Byzantine commander in the city. It lasted one year and nine days, until reinforcements finally arrived from Constantinople. Belisarius broke-out of Rome and chased the dispirited Goths back to Ravenna, where he was able to besiege Wittigis. But this as it turn out proved the high-point of Belisarius' Italian campaign and indeed his career. Back in Constantinople, the general's stunning successes had stoked the paranoia of Theodora, who was distrustful of anyone potentially a threat to her husband's position and her own status. In June 538, she persuaded Justinian to dispatch another general to Italy to keep an eye on Belisarius; the eunuch Narses (d. 573). But this only hampered the campaign: Belisarius and Narses quarrelled over strategy, and the split command undermined Belisarius' authority with his subordinates. One result was the capture of Milan, the largest and richest city in Italy, only to be recovered and razed by the Ostrogoths. This disaster convinced Justinian to recall Narses, and afterwards, Belisarius quickly consolidated his control of Italy. By May 540 a land and naval blockade of their capital of Ravenna had finally convinced the Goths to negotiate. Belisarius tricked the Ostrogoths into surrendering the city by claiming he would revolt against Constantinople and declare himself Western Emperor. The Italian war seemed at long last over except for some mopping-up, but that had to be left to lessor men, because Belisarius was urgently recalled to deal with a new threat in the east. Despite the annual tribute as a part of the "eternal peace", the undermanned Byzantine defences had proven too tempting for the Sassanids, now under Kavadh's son Khosrow I (531-79). Khosrow is the most illustrious of all the Sassanid rulers, remembered for both his military successes and far-reaching reforms. During his ambitious reign, he transformed the aging Sassanid state into a strong centralised government. He introduced a rational taxation system, was a prolific builder of everything from roads to frontier defences, and broke the power of the feudal aristocracy by creating Persia's first standing army under firm imperial control. In every way, Khosrow tried to increase the prosperity and welfare of his subjects: he founded a medical academy, introduced chess from India, and spurred a renaissance of the arts. He also greatly expansion of the Academy of Gundeshapur into one of the most important centers of learning in the world, as a focal point for the combination of Greek and Indian sciences along with Persian traditions. Much of Khosrow's achievement would pass to the Islamic world, and have a profound influence on its political, cultural, and scholarly life. Meanwhile in 540, Khosrow broke the "enternal peace", and began a major offensive into Eastern Imperial lands, sacking a number of cities including Antioch, the third city of the empire; the Byzantine-Persian War (540-562). Belisarius had some success in the east, but the war effectively became a stalemate, and then petered-out when a devastating outbreak of Bubonic plague swept through both empires. The Plague of Justinian (541–542) was the most devastating epidemic to hit Europe before the Black Death of the 14th century. It first appeared in Egypt in 541, and then spreading throughout the Mediterranean region. In Constantinople, perhaps 40% of the population perished; some 300,000 people. In total, estimates of the dead ranging from 25-50 million people, almost 25% of the Mediterranean populace. It penetrated neither northern Europe nor the countryside, and may well have been bubonic plague, like its more devastating successor, with black rats being the primary carriers which kept close to the ports and ships. The plague would come back repeatedly in different strains throughout the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries, with each outbreak becoming more localized and less virulent, until the last in 750. Even Justinian himself was struck by the plague, although he would later recover. With her husband near death, Theodora became acutely aware of her precarious grip on power. As her paranoia took over again, she stripped Belisarius of his command, who spent more than a year in undeserved disgrace. Belisarius would eventually be recalled as the situation in Italy took a dramatic turn for the worse. In his absence, a new leader had risen among the Ostrogoths, Totila (d. 552). Totila was a skilled military commander, screw politician, and young; still only 25. He enjoyed several advantages and exploited every one: the plague had devastated the Byzantine army; the Sassanid war forced Justinian to deploy most of his forces to the east; and the Italian population, especially the middle classes, resented the reintroduction of heavy Byzantine taxes. The young conqueror's rise was as swift as it was complete, defeating every imperial force sent against him, and regaining control of virtually all Italy by the summer of 543, including the great city of Naples which fell to a protracted siege. With only Rome, Ravenna, and Florence still holding out, Justinian recalled Belisarius and sent him back to Italy. But his second Italian campaigned was five long years of frustration. Still not entirely trusted by Justinian, he was denied both overall command and sufficient resources. It took all his typical brilliance just to hold onto those cities still left in imperial hands. It the end, it fell to Belisarius' replacement and old nemesis, Narses, to finally secure the reconquest of Italy. By 551, the empire had somewhat recovered from the plague, and Narses arrived in Italy with a massive army, 35,000 strong. The Ostrogoths were routed at the Battle of Taginae (July 552), and Totila himself slain; it proved the decisive battle of the war. The Ostrogothic Kingdom effectively collapsed, though pockets of resistance held out for several more years. Once more all of Italy was back under imperial rule, albeit an Italy devastated by the imperial armies as it had never been by the barbarians; Rome itself was little more than a ruin having swapped hands five times over the course of the war. More was to follow in southern Spain, where revolts against Visigothic rule in the great southern cities of Córdoba and, later, Seville appealled to Constantinople for help. Justinian leapt at the chance, and, with a small imperial force, established a new Byzantine province on the southern Spainish coast, that would last more than a half-century. Constantinople now had a toe-hold on almost all parts of the Mediterranean Roman core, the most thoroughly Romanized area, as well as the most revenue-producing. For a century after Justinian’s death, the imperial fleets were supreme, Byzantine merchant-ship moved about unmolested, and the Mediterranean was once again a "Roman lake". Near the end of his life, Justinian withdrew more and more from public affairs, while occupying himself in reconciling the Eastern and Western Churches, but his efforts were thwarted in the end by clerical intransigence on both sides. He died of a heart attack in 565 after 38-years on the throne; he was 83 years old. With the benefit of hindsight, Justinian the Great seems something of a failure. We labour under the handicap of knowing that his conquests, great as they were, did not last. Indeed, the Byzantine fiscal system was arguably not robust enough to fight several wars at once as well as building on a considerable scale. Just three years after Justinian's death, another barbarian group, the Lombards, descended upon Italy, and most of it was gone again by the end of the century; the Visigoths recovered Byzantine Spain in 624. Regardless, Justinian behaved as people thought an emperor should, reuniting and restoring the old Roman Empire; after-all no one could conceive a world without it. On his death, people thought the empire stood on the brink of a new and glorious age, where it would regain and even surpass all of its former glories. But Justinian's ineffectual successors could not maintain his legacy in the face of renewed barbarian pressure on the Danube, Persia rumbling towards an inevitable and chronic war, and in the mid-7th-century, a new predatory rival, the armies of Islam. A terrible time lay ahead. Category:Historical Periods